Pliny: A model for digital support of scholarship

John Douglas Bradley

Abstract

Scholars in the Humanities have been far less engaged in the adoption of digital methods to support their research than what already committed practitioners in the Digital Humanities (DH) have expected. The author of this article claims that one reason for this is that the digital technologies and tools promoted by the DH community work (including the provision of digital resources delivered to the user by the WWW) connect only with a part of what humanities scholarship is all about: reading of many documents, responding to that reading, analysing and developing a personal interpretation of these materials, and the publication of this interpretation.

Pliny is prototype software that explores what a tool would be like that supported humanities scholarship in more of its aspects. It is a desktop application that integrates with the World Wide Web, and provides functions that support all the aspects of scholarship outlined above. This article describes Pliny’s design and explains why we have designed it in the way that it is.